In Steven Spielberg’s summer blockbuster Disclosure Day, the aliens’ message to humanity, on the brink of nuclear war, is that it must embrace empathy. Pretty uncontroversial, surely?
Not for Gad Saad, the outspoken Canadian evolutionary psychologist and sociologist, whose latest book, Suicidal Empathy: Dying to be Kind, has topped the New York Times and Audible nonfiction bestseller lists.
According to Saad, “[m]any of the policy decisions that have wreaked havoc in the West stem from [a] poor calibration of empathy, resulting in a society that is galloping rapidly toward the abyss of infinite lunacy. Whether when dealing with immigration, the justice system, the homelessness crisis, or transgender rights in women’s sports, outlandish policies are instituted precisely because of suicidal empathy.”
He continues: “Confessing to one’s privilege guilt has become a common reflex among Western intelligentsia”—and their students. So, just another woke-bashing polemicist?
No, that won’t really do. Like it or not, Saad, a 61-year-old Lebanese Jew whose family fled to Canada when he was 11 to escape antisemitic persecution at the outbreak of Lebanon’s civil war, has a big cultural footprint and a growing fanbase.
On X, Elon Musk, a longtime devotee of Saad’s work, has championed the book relentlessly, declaring it “Gad’s honest truth”. So, too, have his fellow tycoons, Marc Andreessen, the tech venture capitalist and a key figure in Donald Trump’s transition team, and Bill Ackman, a hedge fund billionaire and another strong supporter of the president. In the United States, Saad has been engaged in an extensive promotional tour, while the book is being translated into multiple languages.
From its first pages, he makes clear that his thesis does not amount to an outright rejection of empathy, which he considers “a noble and evolutionarily selected virtue, a central feature of our humanity given that we are a deeply social species” (and which the Oxford English Dictionary defines as “the ability to understand and share the feelings of another”).
Saad’s beef is with its modern “dysregulation”, driven by personal narcissism (I am morally pure) and the ideology of western guilt (I must atone for my privilege and the legacy of oppression). Suicidal empathy, he argues, “is a deadly contagion… If not properly contained, it will destroy the West”.
To support this bold claim, he assembles an impressive range of data and academic meta-analyses, punctuated by vivid case studies. In 2016, for example, Karsten Nordal Hauken, a Norwegian man who had been raped by a Somali immigrant, expressed “a strong sense of guilt and responsibility” that his attacker had been deported.
In 2023, Jordan Neely, a 30-year-old homeless black man, boarded a New York subway carriage and allegedly made repeated death threats to his fellow passengers. Daniel Penny, a US Marine veteran who is white, subdued Neely with a chokehold that led to his death. In Saad’s telling, “Rather than hailing the heroism of Penny, the supremely progressive Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, brought two charges against Penny, criminally negligent homicide and second-degree manslaughter.” He was found not guilty of the first alleged felony, while the manslaughter charge was dismissed.
Perhaps most gruelling of all Saad’s examples is the case of Amanda Kijera, a progressive activist in Haiti, who, in April 2010, declared herself “committed to preserving the dignity of Black men in a world which constantly stereotypes them as violent savages”—and then revealed that, two weeks previously, “I was held on a rooftop in Haiti and raped repeatedly by one of the very men who I had spent the bulk of my life advocating for.” Unbelievably, she added that she was “grateful for the experience”.
Not surprisingly, Saad addresses the trans controversy at length—and abrasively so. “The trans hysteria,” he writes, “is emblematic of what happens to a society when the desire to be suicidally empathetic to a minuscule minority takes precedence over the most fundamental features of biological reality shared by a majority.”
Next up is the contentious notion of “equity”—equality of outcome rather than of opportunity—which became the subject of angry debate in this country in June when the Sikh Briton Vickrum Digwa, 23, was imprisoned for life for the murder of Henry Nowak, 18. The response of police at the scene of the crime—the initial refusal of officers to believe the dying Nowak when he said, repeatedly, that he had been stabbed—led to a furious political argument over the guidelines of the National Police Chiefs’ Council, which state explicitly that correct policing in “racialised” settings “does not mean treating everyone ‘the same’ or being ‘colour blind’ (racial equality)”.
For Saad, the ideology of equity is wreaking havoc in public services, the professions and our principal institutions. Among the examples he cites is the egregious case of CanMEDS, the framework established by the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada, which in 2023 proposed a new model of best practice that “would seek to centre values such as anti-oppression, anti-racism, and social justice, rather than medical expertise”.
There are good reasons to get to grips with Saad’s work and influence, whatever you make of his political convictions and provocative style
In the UK, Saad has yet to break through as a public intellectual. But there are good reasons to get to grips with his work and influence, whatever you make of his political convictions, provocative style and love of Maga-adjacent “Podcastistan”. He has appeared no fewer than 12 times on The Joe Rogan Experience, and his own show, The Saad Truth, which has been running since 2014, has 370,000 subscribers on YouTube, alongside his 1.3m followers on X.
On the subject of empathy, he is not as much of an outlier as you might suppose. A decade ago, Paul Bloom, professor of psychology and cognitive science at Yale University, argued in Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion that this particular emotional capacity is often a “poor moral guide” and “innumerate”, driving us towards decisions that, in a utilitarian sense, can cause great harm.
In 2024, Allie Beth Stuckey’s Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion was also a New York Times bestseller; presenting the conservative Christian podcaster’s case against the alleged bullying of the faithful into supporting social justice causes to avoid the charge of cruelty.
Earlier this year, Rowan Williams—as far from a right-wing troll as one can imagine—offered a sharp critique of certain aspects of empathy in his brilliant book Solidarity: The Work of Recognition. Too often, the former Archbishop of Canterbury writes, empathy serves the needs of “the clamorous self”, while the “danger of trying to make empathic identification do the work of solidarity is increasingly clear in the prevalence of primarily performative acts of supposed solidarity, declarations of common concern that do not change toxic relations and power imbalances but in effect reinforce them” (his italics).
All of which is to say that Saad brings his caustic voice to a table already in place and to a legitimate philosophical question. What he adds—the essence of his cultural significance—is a scholarly background in evolutionary psychology and behavioural science that enables him to interpret familiar themes through a distinctive lens.
He presents bad ideas as dangerous “pathogens” and viral contagions against which a sane society must inoculate itself (among the strategies he proposes: “Resist the Immediate Gratification of the Empathy-Based Dopamine Hit”; “Reject the Urge to Be an Empathetic Fence-Sitter”; and “Expect and Demand Reciprocity—Otherwise, You Are in a Parasitic Relationship”).
Most of his fellow conservative influencers and intellectuals associate their claims closely with Maga ideology or Judeo-Christian heritage, and, in many cases, insist that their political beliefs are inextricable from their faith. Saad is certainly a supporter of Trump, whose victory in 2024, he writes, “has helped to quickly reverse some of the insanity”. But the ideology of the populist nationalist right, and the proselytising religion that so often infuses it, are not the foundation of his ideas.
Though proud of his Jewishness—and a staunch defender of Israel, especially since 7th October—Saad is an atheist who argued in The Saad Truth about Happiness (2023) that it “is an affront to human dignity to suggest that purpose and meaning in one’s life can only be garnered via the belief in a deity”. A polemicist, for sure; but not an evangelist.
Though he is taking up a professorship at the University of Mississippi this summer, he has held a chair at Concordia University in Montreal since 1994, based in its business school (he holds a doctorate in marketing from Cornell). His academic work, as opposed to his popular tracts, has focused upon the lessons of evolutionary theory for business and consumer behaviour.
Just as Richard Dawkins deployed Darwinism and genetic science to storm into the public square, so Saad has deftly quarried his fairly dry academic specialism to make a name as a pundit, influencer and significant voice in independent media. As he told Sean Hannity in June on the Fox News presenter’s podcast, he is explicitly “in the business of trying to persuade people”. He rejects outright the constrained role of the “stay-in-your-lane professor”.
In the same spirit, he compares his interventions to a stand-up comedian’s “bits” and talks often of his “satire”. Though intellectually combative by nature, he is also genial and entertaining in conversation—projecting a quite different persona from, say, Jordan Peterson, who oscillates between emotional lability and civilisational despair, or Tucker Carlson, who increasingly confines himself to manic antisemitism and a fixation with the demonic.
Saad loves to talk about football (the “soccer” variety), glamorous women and popular culture: the contest between Star Wars and Star Trek fans (he sides with the latter), superhero movies, The Godfather, The Silence of the Lambs. His trademark sign-off is, invariably, “Cheers.”
His first book, The Evolutionary Bases of Consumption, was published in 2007, but it was 2020’s The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense—a bestseller in the US and Canada—that propelled him to stardom in the escalating culture wars. As in Suicidal Empathy, Saad argued that truth was being sacrificed on the altar of emotion and the ideology of postmodernism, cultural relativism and identity politics. “The quest for truth,” he wrote, “should always supersede one’s ego-defensive desire to be proven right.”
Warming to his theme, he added: “Much of the lunacy that we see from the ‘progressive’ camp is a result of consequentialism when it comes to the truth.” What he meant was that the “deontological” defence of truth (it is a core moral principle that we should not lie) was being replaced by a very different scale of priorities, in which the impact of facts upon the feelings of others was being used to justify their suppression.
Again, what made the book original was its recruitment of evolutionary and epidemiological language. In the midst of Covid-19, he argued that the world was experiencing another “devastating pandemic, a collective malady that destroys people’s capacity to think rationally. Unlike other pandemics where biological pathogens are to blame, the current culprit is composed of a collection of bad ideas, spawned on university campuses, that chip away at our edifices of reason, freedom, and individual dignity.”
In Saad’s framing, these “mind viruses take hold of one’s neuronal circuitry” and those of institutions, such as universities, that are not immunised against their emotional power; like biological pathogens, they have defence mechanisms against attack that ward off the antibodies of rationality and evidence (notably, the instant labelling of any challenge as bigoted or racist); they reproduce like evolutionary “memes”.
This analytical model resonated widely—and with Musk, in particular, who said that the book “gave me nightmares” and began to speak and post regularly about the “woke mind virus”. Though he and Saad have only met twice, the world’s first trillionaire became his most powerful champion and has often said that one of the main incentives for his $44bn acquisition of Twitter in October 2022 was to drive the “virus” from the body politic.
In that sense alone, Saad deserves to be seen as a consequential thinker. He is also spectacularly divisive. You would need a heart of stone not to laugh at the apoplexy into which he sends the reliably sanctimonious Steven Pinker, who posted on X in May that “I find the new right-wing contempt for empathy… contemptible.”
To this cry from the heart, Saad responded cheerfully: “[suicidal empathy] has nothing to do with ‘right-wing contempt for empathy.’ Empathy is an evolutionarily selected trait for a social species to exhibit. But as is the case for countless psychiatric disorders, an adaptive trait can become maladaptive if it misfires.… What I just wrote holds true irrespective of whether you support Trump or not. I hope this clarifies it for you.”
In the socialist magazine Jacobin, Matt McManus wrote that the publication of Saad’s latest book marked “a great day for the Left”, that it amounted to no more than “the unreconstructed grievances of red-pilled Twitter given physical form”, and that its author was “a poor man’s Jordan Peterson”.
And, to be fair, it isn’t only progressives who have come after Saad. His book was unfavourably reviewed in Quillette and UnHerd, hardly bastions of the revolution.
It is certainly true that he has many flaws—not least a vanity that sullies some of his writing. There is a lengthy and embarrassing section in Suicidal Empathy about the tax he has to pay that is simply special pleading masquerading as analysis. “Surely,” he writes, “the hedge fund manager who is taxed on his yearly bonus is not experiencing the same intrusion to his sense of personhood as the author who is being taxed on his life’s story.”
In spite of his claim to have funny bones, not all the jokes land: referring ironically to home invaders as “surprise house guests” is cringeworthy rather than clever. Some of his prose is overcooked and diminishes the force of his thesis (“The invertebrate castrati can commit Civilizational Seppuku emboldened by their misguided suicidal moral vanity.”)
Another charge levelled at Saad is that he does not pay evenhanded attention to the contagions of right-wing conspiracism, QAnon, and post-truth populism. To this, his response is, to my mind, reasonable: he is a university professor, focusing specifically upon the ideas that are flowing from western campuses in the wider world.
The ideas of the postmodernists are much more powerful in the public sphere today than during their lifetimes
What Saad grasps—what alarms him—is that higher education institutions are finishing schools for the elites of tomorrow. The postmodernists Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida died in 1984 and 2004, respectively, but their ideas are much more powerful in the public sphere today than during their lifetimes.
Saad’s use of evolutionary theory and epidemiology is an effective delivery system for this fundamental proposition: that ideas are very powerful, but that the lag between initial infection and wildfire virality can be lengthy, often lasting many years.
In this respect, he is updating Isaiah Berlin’s famous warning in Two Concepts of Liberty (1958): “[ideas] often acquire an unchecked momentum and an irresistible power over multitudes of men that may grow too violent to be affected by rational criticism. Over a hundred years ago, the German poet [Heinrich] Heine warned the French not to underestimate the power of ideas: philosophical concepts nurtured in the stillness of a professor’s study could destroy a civilization.”
Whether you find Saad’s work stimulating, irritating or an intolerable provocation, its stubborn cultural power is a warning to those who believe that the populist right is running out of steam. The decline of Donald Trump, the electoral destruction of Viktor Orbán in Hungary in April and the mishaps of Reform UK have all fostered a dawning optimism that Maga and its global counterparts are petering out.
This is not entirely baseless: 11 years since Trump descended the golden escalator, the power of that initial insurgency has dwindled. But it is wise not to underestimate the resilience and plasticity of the contemporary right. Indeed, one of its salient characteristics has proved to be its sheer variety: from the mythic symbolism of Peterson and Jonathan Pageau and the nationalism of Yoram Hazony, via the economic populism of Steve Bannon and the tech apocalypticism of Peter Thiel, to the “Dark Enlightenment” monarchism of Curtis Yarvin and the Catholic post-liberalism of Adrian Vermeule and Patrick Deneen.
To this list should be added Saad’s use of parasitology and contagion dynamics to explain the left’s capture of individual minds and institutional culture. Without question, the content, tone and energy of his public discourse have struck a chord that his opponents would be foolish to ignore.
A movement that adapts is a movement that survives, and this one, in all its metastasising multiplicity, is not going away. Progressives keep asking: “Who is our Joe Rogan?” They should also ask: “Who is our Gad Saad?” As he himself would say, evolutionary science teaches us that in politics, no less than biology, the most dangerous viruses are those with the cunning to mutate.
